


Colours

by 0_MK



Category: The Arcana (Visual Novel)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-24
Updated: 2017-10-24
Packaged: 2019-01-22 08:54:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12477916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/0_MK/pseuds/0_MK
Summary: Fear, magic, prophecy, and colour. A stream-of-consciousness ficlet based on Book I-V choices, unnamed MC with female pronouns.





	Colours

The world’s all reflections and glass, smooth planes that gleam and glow, the soft cool embrace of a sweet-coloured snake amongst pillows and silks and the perfume and smoke of the store. It’s the bright taste of pumpkin bread, butter melting daffodil yellow over it. It’s the clean lines of the cards, the spark of magic, the clarity of mind. Sunlight, and open skies where the sun can caress her smiling face. It’s all light, and brightness.

It’s when the sun goes down that she feels something missing. Missing? Not the right word. She’s not sure. She doesn’t like to think about it. She wraps herself in bright colours and soft fabrics and waits for the dawn, for the light.

But not tonight. Tonight, Asra leaves, his eyes sliding away from hers. He’s water, he’s smoke, he’s soft and fluid and impossible to grasp - as ever, as always - and he’s leaving, again. He’ll be taking some of the colour away with him. She turns the cards for him, because he asks, because she cares, and she sees the colour rise in his cheeks, the soft peach she sees nowhere else but when his eyes meet hers. He leaves in the fog, the starlight in his eyes and the city fog in his hair. The cards are heavy in her hand. She misses his soft shades already, not knowing why.

She answers the door that had interrupted her reading for Asra, and in walks new colours. Bold, brash, vibrant, commanding. Even the pastels are determined. The purity of the colours leaves her feeling small and weak, and the Countess’ eyes are heavy-lidded like a predator. Scenting weakness, indulging it for amusement’s sake. But whatever the Countess sees in the cards - or the reader - seems to please her. The Countess takes her leave, and the moonlight gleams bright for her, bowing to the woman’s whims. There’s a space left by the Countess’ boldness that leaves the apprentice feeling small.

She tries to think of sunlight. She turns, to go back to her colours, to the world she knows.

A whisper. She turns, and sees red, and black. Colours stark and somehow terrifying amongst her lights, and her memory of Asra’s softness; Asra wears reds, but not like this, the shop has glass in it, but not like this. It’s jarring. It’s frightening. He stands over her, hard lines, a raven’s beak, a shark’s smile, and she quails back from him. Still his shadow wraps around her. The sky is dark outside and she has no strength of her own, not anymore. There’s something wrong about those colours, fundamentally, viscerally. Fight or flight, and for once she has the strength to bare her teeth, even as she backs up against the glass and tapestries. She wants him gone. This dark bird takes wing, out into the fog, and for a moment she feels safe. Sleep does not come easily, even wrapped in all the colours she can find.

She’s glad for the dawn.

The morning brings sunlight. But in the market, she sees that sharp black again, meets his gaze across the crowded walkway. She runs, frightened, heart racing. Black. Black, and red.

Red. The fruits topple from the basket, and shame-faced - pastel pinks rising in her cheeks - she fumbles to make amends for what she’s done. There’s that gut reaction again, tremors, as she holds the ripe fruit. Knowing that, within that pastel skin, the seeds are gory and the juice sanguine.

Black. The raven hasn’t found her. Red. The fruit is buried in her bag. The sunshine is bright, and she can push the memories from her mind.

But those colours find her again, as sure as a prophecy. A portrait staring back at her. All the colours are soft and beautiful. But the red, and the black, arrests her. She’s heard the poets speak of getting lost in someone’s eyes, but never has she felt like there were eyes that would seek her out and take her with them.

She's pulled away by words and promises, and she forgets those unnerving colours. Sunlight fills the places where memory should be.

The palace is awash with colour. The Countess’ lips. Portia’s hair. The quality of the light on marble, it’s so different. These are not her colours, but she loves them all the same. But she knows, deep down, these will never be her colours. Her colours are glass and arcana, snake-scale and pillows, incense smoke and Asra’s starlight eyes. The colours in the palace are beautiful, but the kind of beauty found in paintings. It’s not for her.

The dogs, so white, so pure. Their eyes, that same red, arresting. She feels her body going cool, still, frightened like a rabbit or a deer. But they move like they love her, and she finds relief in that. She feels stronger for it.

When she chases a Deer through the chaos of the garden, those eyes find her again.

She should have known.

She should have known, when the juice splashed red over snow-pale muzzles, when they stood over her licking their chops, she should have known. It was red, red like blood. But her cards were incomplete, and she was not safe. Not ready. She was frantic and unfocused and she did not listen to her own instincts, but instead to the fear of incompletion, of a Countess’ game, of the world of these bold palatial colours where she did not belong nor was she familiar with.

She followed them. Away from the sunlight. Deeper into shadow.

Into shadow where no sunlight could reach, or perhaps never had.

Black. Shadows. Red. Those eyes.

Black. The ash. Red. The sudden realisation.

Black, a dead man’s ashes wrapping around her like an embrace. Red, the hands tight around her throat and the whisper in her ear.

She ran - run little rabbit run - but it clung to her, to her hair and her skin. He would cling, that laugh, that hold, those nightmares. Even with her deck complete, she could not shake them.

Red. Black.

She wanted her own colours back.


End file.
